Why did the first half of
the nineteenth century lift up, as voices of the age, a group of
pessimistic poets−Byron in England, De Musset in France, Heine in
Germany, Leopardi in Italy, Pushkin and Lermontof in Russia; a group of
pessimistic composers−Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, and even the later
Beethoven (a pessimist trying to convince himself that he is an
optimist); and above all, a profoundly pessimistic philosopher−Arthur
Schopenhauer?

That great
anthology of woe, The World as
Will and Idea,
appeared in 1818. It was the age of the "Holy" Alliance.
Waterloo had been fought, the Revolution was dead, and the "Son of the
Revolution" was rotting on a rock in a distant sea. Something of
Schopenhauer's apotheosis of Will was due to that magnificent and bloody
apparition of the Will made flesh in the little Corsican; and something
of his despair of life came from the pathetic distance of St.
Helena−Will defeated at last, and dark Death the only victor of all the
wars. The Bourbons were restored, the feudal barons were returning to
claim their lands, and the pacific idealism of Alexander had unwittingly
mothered a league for the suppression of progress everywhere. The great
age was over. "I thank God," said Goethe, "that I am not young in so
thoroughly finished a world."

All Europe lay
prostrate. Millions of strong men had perished; millions of acres of
land had been neglected or, laid waste; everywhere on the Continent life
had to begin again at the bottom, to recover painfully and slowly the
civilizing economic surplus that had been swallowed up in war.
Schopenhauer, traveling through France and Austria in 1804, was struck
by the chaos and uncleanliness of the villages, the wretched poverty of
the farmers, the unrest and misery
of the towns. The passage of the Napoleonio and
counter-Napoleonic armies had left scars of ravage on the face of every
country. Moscow was in ashes. In England, proud victor in
the strife, the farmers were ruined by the fall in the price of wheat;
and the industrial workers were tasting all the horrors of the nascent
and uncontrolled factory-system. Demobilization added to
unemployment. "I have heard my father say," wrote Carlyle,
"that in the years when oatmeal was as high as ten shillings a stone, he
had noticed the laborers retire each separately to a brook, and there
drink instead of dining, anxious only to hide their misery from one
another.”[1]
Never had life seemed so meaningless, or so mean.

Yes, the Revolution
was dead; and with it the life seemed to have gone out of the soul of
Europe. That new heaven, called Utopia, whose glamour had relieved the
twilight of the gods, had receded into a dim future where only young
eyes could see it; the older ones had followed that lure
long enough, and turned away
from it now as a mockery of men's hopes. Only the young can live in the
future, and only the old can live in the past; men were most
of them forced to live in the present, and the present was a ruin: How
many thousands of heroes
and believers had fought for the Revolution! How the hearts of youth
everywhere in Europe had turned towards the young republic, and had
lived on the light and hope of it,−until Beethoven tore into shreds the
dedication of his Heroic Symphony to the man
who had ceased
to be the Son of the
Revolution and had became the son in
law of reaction. How many had fought even then for the great
hope, and had believed, with passionate uncertainty, to the very end?
And now here was the very end: Waterloo, and St. Helena, and Vienna; and
on the throne of prostrate France a Bourbon who had learned nothing and
forgotten nothing. This was the
glorious denouement of a generation of such hope and effort as
human history had never known before. What
a comedy this tragedy was for
those whose laughter was yet
bitter with tears!

Many of the poor
had, in these days of disillusionment and suffering, the consolation of
religious hope; but a large proportion of the upper classes had lost
their faith, and looked out upon a ruined world with no alleviating
vision of a vaster life in whose final justice and beauty these ugly
ills would be dissolved. And in truth it was hard enough to believe that
such a sorry planet as men saw in 1818 was held up in the hand of an
intelligent and benevolent God. Mephistopheles had triumphed, and every
Faust was in despair. Voltaire had sown the whirlwind, and Schopenhauer
was to reap the harvest.

Seldom had the
problem of evil been flung so vividly and insistently into the face of
philosophy and religion. Every martial grave from Boulogne to Moscow and
the Pyramids lifted a mute interrogation to the indifferent stars. How
long, O Lord, and Why? Was this almost universal calamity the vengeance
of a just God on the Age of Reason and unbelief? Was it a call to the
penitent intellect to bend before the ancient virtues of faith, hope and
charity? So Schlegel thought, and Novalis, and Chateaubriand, and De
Musset, and Southey, and Wordsworth, and Gogol; and they turned back to
the old faith like wasted prodigals happy to be home again. But some
others made harsher answer: that the chaos of Europe but reflected the
chaos of the universe; that there was no divine order after all, nor any
heavenly hope; that God, if God there was, was blind, and Evil brooded
over the face of the earth. So Byron, and Heine, and Lermontof, and
Leopardi, and our philosopher.

II. THE MAN

Schopenhauer was
born at Dantzig on February 22, 1788. His father was a merchant noted
for ability, hot temper, independence of character, and love of
liberty. He moved from Dantzig to Hamburg when Arthur was five years
old, because Dantzig lost its freedom in the annexation of Poland in
1793. Young Schopenhauer, therefore, grew up in the midst of business
and finance; and though he soon abandoned the mercantile career into
which his father had pushed him, it left its mark upon him in a certain
bluntness of manner, a realistic turn of mind, a knowledge of the world
and of men; it made him the antipodes of that closet or academic type of
philosopher whom he so despised. The father died, apparently by his own
hand, in 1805. The paternal grandmother had died insane.

"The character or
will," says Schopenhauer, "is inherited from the father; the intellect
from the mother."[2]
The mother had intellect−she became one of the most popular novelists
of her day−but she had temperament and temper too. She had been unhappy
with her prosaic husband; and when he died she took to free love, and
moved to Weimar as the fittest climate for that sort of life. Arthur
Schopenhauer reacted to this as Hamlet to his mother's re-marriage; and
his quarrels with his mother taught him a large part of those
half-truths about women with which he was to reason his philosophy. One
of her letters to him reveals the state of their affairs: "You are
unbearable and burdensome, and very hard to live with; all your good
qualities are overshadowed by your conceit, and made useless to the
world simply because you cannot restrain your propensity to pick holes
in other people:”[3]
So they arranged to live apart; he was to come only to her "at homes,"
and be one guest among others; they could then be as polite to each
other as strangers, instead of hating each other like relatives. Goethe,
who liked Mme. Schopenhauer because she let him bring his Christiane
with him, made matters worse by telling the mother that her son would
become a very famous man; the mother had never heard of two geniuses in
the same family. Finally, in some culminating quarrel, the mother pushed
her son and rival down the stairs; whereupon our philosopher bitterly
informed her that she would be known to posterity only through him.
Schopenhauer quitted Weimar soon afterward; and though the mother lived
twenty-four years more, he never saw her again. Byron, also a child of
1788, seems to have had similar luck with his mother. These men were
almost by this circumstance doomed to pessimism; a man who has not known
a mother's love−and worse, has known a mother's hatred−has no cause to
be infatuated with the world.

Meanwhile
Schopenhauer had gone through "gymnasium" and university, and had
learned more than was on their schedules. He had his fling at love and
the world, with results that affected his character and his philosophy.[4]
He became gloomy, cynical, and suspicious; he was obsessed with fears
and evil fancies; he kept his pipes under lock and key, and never
trusted his neck to a barber's razor; and he slept with loaded pistols
at his bedside−presumably for the convenience of the burglar. He could
not bear noise: "I have long held the opinion," he writes, "that the
amount of noise which anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse
proportion to his mental capacity, and may therefore be regarded as a
pretty fair measure of it.... Noise is a torture to all intellectual
people. . . The superabundant display of vitality which takes the form
of knocking, hammering, and tumbling things about, has proved a daily
torment to me all my life long."[5]
He had an almost paranoiac sense of unrecognized greatness; missing
success and fame, he turned within and gnawed at his own soul.

He had no mother,
no wife, no child, no family, no country. "He was absolutely alone, with
not a single friend; and between one and none there lies an infinity."[6]
Even more than Goethe he was immune to the nationalistic fevers of his
age. In 1813 he so far fell under the sway of Fichte's enthusiasm for a
war of liberation against Napoleon, that he thought of volunteering, and
actually bought a set of arms. But prudence seized him in time; he
argued that "Napoleon gave after all only concentrated and untrammeled
utterance to that self-assertion and lust for more life which weaker
mortals feel but must perforce disguise.”[7]
Instead of going to war he went to the country and wrote a doctor's
thesis in philosophy. After this dissertation
On the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason
(1813),[8]
Schopenhauer gave all his time, and devoted all his power, to the work
which was to be his masterpiece
The World as Will and Idea.
He sent the MS. to
the publisher
magna cum laude; here, he
said, was no mere rehash of old ideas, but a highly coherent structure
of original thought, "clearly intelligible, vigorous, and not without
beauty"; a book "which would hereafter be the source and occasion of a
hundred other books:”[9]
All of which was outrageously egotistic, and absolutely true. Many years
later Schopenhauer was so sure of having solved the chief problems of
philosophy that he thought of having his signet ring carved with an
image of the Sphinx throwing herself down the abyss, as she had promised
to do on having her riddles answered.

Nevertheless, the book
attracted hardly any attention; the world was too poor and exhausted to
read about its poverty and exhaustion. Sixteen years after publication
Schopenhauer was informed that the greater part of the edition had been
sold as waste paper. In his essay on Fame, in "The Wisdom of Life," he
quotes, with evident allusion to his masterpiece, two remarks of
Lichtenberger's: "Works like this are as a mirror: if an ass looks in
you cannot expect an angel to look out"; and "when a head and a book
come into collision, and one sounds hollow, is it always the book?"
Schopenhauer goes on, with the voice of wounded vanity: "The more a man
belongs to posterity−in other words, to humanity in general−so much
the more is he an alien to his contemporaries; for since his work is not
meant for them as such, but only in so far as they form part of mankind
at large, there is none of that familiar local color about his
productions which would appeal to them."

And then he becomes as eloquent as the fox in
the fable: "Would a musician feel flattered by the loud applause of an
audience if he knew that they were nearly all deaf, and that to conceal
their infirmity he saw one or two persons applauding? And what would he
say if he discovered that those one or two persons had often taken
bribes to secure the loudest applause for the poorest player?"-In some
men egotism is a compensation for the absence of fame; in others,
egotism lends a generous cooperation to its presence.

So completely did Schopenhauer put
himself into this book that his later works are but commentaries on it;
he became Talmudist to his own Torah, exegete to his own jeremiads. In
1838 he published an essay On
the Will in Nature,
which was to, some degree incorporated into the enlarged
edition of The World as Will and
Idea
which appeared in 1844. In 1841 came
The Two Ground-Problems of Ethics, and in
1851 two substantial volumes of Parerga et Parliapomena−literally,
"Byproducts and Leavings"−which have been translated into English as
the Essays. For this,
the most readable of his works, and replete with wisdom and wit,
Schopenhauer received, as his total remuneration, ten free copies.
Optimism is difficult under such circumstances.

Only one adventure disturbed the
monotony of his studious seclusion after leaving Weimar. He had hoped
for a chance to present his philosophy at one of the great universities
of Germany; the chance came in 1822, when he was invited to Berlin as
privat-docent. He
deliberately chose for his lectures the very hours at which the then
mighty Hegel was scheduled to teach; Schopenhauer trusted that the
students would view him and Hegel with the eyes of posterity. But the
students could not so far anticipate, and Schopenhauer found himself
talking to empty seats. He resigned, and revenged himself by those
bitter diatribes against Hegel which mar the later editions of his
chef-d'oevre. In 1831 a
cholera epidemic broke out in Berlin; both Hegel and Schopenhauer fled;
but Hegel returned prematurely, caught the infection, and died in a few
days. Schopenhauer never stopped until he reached
Frankfort, where he spent the remainder
of his seventy-two years.

Like a sensible pessimist, he had
avoided that pitfall of optimists−the attempt to make a living with the
pen. He had inherited an interest in his father's firm, and lived in
modest comfort on the revenue which this brought him. He invested his
money with a wisdom unbecoming a philosopher. When a company in which he
had taken shares failed, and the other creditors agreed to a 70%
settlement, Schopenhauer fought for full payment, and won. He had enough
to engage two rooms in a boarding-house; there he lived the last thirty
years of his life, with no comrade but a dog. He called the little
poodle Atma (the Brahmins' term for the World-Soul), but the wags of the
town called it "Young Schopenhauer." He ate his dinners, usually, at
the Englischer Hof. At the beginning of each meal he would put a gold
coin upon the table before him; and at the end of each meal he would put
the coin back into his pocket. It was, no doubt, an indignant waiter who
at last asked him the meaning of this invariable ceremony. Schopenhauer
answered that it was his silent wager to drop the coin into the poor-box
on the first day that the English officers dining there should talk of
anything else than horses, women, or dogs.[10]

The universities ignored him and his books,
as if to substantiate his claim that all advances in philosophy are
made outside of academic walls. "Nothing," says Nietzsche, "so offended
the German savants as Schopenhauer's unlikeness to them." But he had
learned some patience; he was confident that, however belated,
recognition would come. And at last, slowly, it came. Men of the middle
classes−lawyers; physicians, merchants−found in him a philosopher who
offered them no mere pretentious jargon of metaphysical unrealities, but
an intelligible survey of the phenomena of actual life. A Europe
disillusioned with the ideals and efforts of 1848 turned almost with
acclamation to this philosophy that had voiced the despair of 1815. The
attack of science upon theology, the socialist indictment of poverty and
war, the biological stress on the struggle for existence,−all these
factors helped to lift Schopenhauer finally to fame.

He was not too old to enjoy his
popularity: he read with avidity all the articles that appeared about
him; he asked his friends to send him every bit of printed comment they
could find-he would pay the postage. In 1854 Wagner sent him a copy of
Der Ring der Nibelugen, with a word in appreciation of
Schopenhauer's philosophy of music. So the great pessimist became almost
an optimist in his old age; he played the flute assiduously after
dinner, and thanked Time for ridding him of the fires of youth. People
came from all over the world to see him; and on his seventieth birthday,
in 1858, congratulations poured in upon him from all quarters and every
continent.

It
was not too soon; he had but two more years to live. On September 21,
1880, he sat down alone to breakfast, apparently well. An hour later
his landlady found him still seated at the table, dead.

III.
THE WORLD AS IDEA

What strikes the reader at once upon
opening The World as Will and Idea is its style. Here is
no Chinese puzzle of Kantian terminology, no Hegelian obfuscation, no
Spinozist geometry; everything is clarity and order; and all is
admirably centered about the leading conception of the world as will,
and therefore strife, and therefore misery. What blunt honesty, what
refreshing vigor, what uncompromising directness! Where his
predecessors are abstract to the point of invisibility, with theories
that give out few windows of illustration upon the actual world,
Schopenhauer, like the son of a business man, is rich in the concrete,
in examples, in applications, even in humor[11]
After Kant, humor in philosophy was a startling innovation.

But why was the book rejected? Partly
because it attacked just those who could have given it publicity−the
university teachers. Hegel was philosophic dictator of Germany in 1818;
yet Schopenhauer loses no time in assailing him. In the preface to the
second edition he writes:

No time
can be more unfavorable to philosophy than that in which it is
shamefully misused on the one hand to further political objects, on the
other as a means of livelihood. . . . Is there then nothing to oppose to
the maxim, Primum vivere, deinde philosophari?[12]
These gentlemen desire to live, and indeed to live by philosophy. To
philosophy they are assigned, with their wives and children.... The
rule, "I sing the song of him whose bread I eat," has always held good;
the making of money by philosophy was regarded by the ancients as the
characteristic of the sophists.... Nothing is to be had for gold but
mediocrity. . . . It is impossible that an age which for twenty years
has applauded a Hegel−that intellectual Caliban−as the greatest of the
philosophers, . . . could make him who has looked on at that desirous of
its approbation.... But rather, truth will always be
paucorum hominum,[13]
and must therefore quietly and modestly wait
for the few whose unusual mode of thought may find it enjoyable....
Life is short, but truth works far and lives long; let us speak the
truth.

These last words are nobly spoken; but
there is something of sour grapes in it all; no man was ever more
anxious for approbation than Schopenhauer. It would have been nobler
still to say nothing ill of Hegel: de vivis nil nisi bonum−of
the living let us say nothing but good. And as for modestly
awaiting recognition,−"I cannot see," says Schopenhauer, "that between
Kant and myself anything has been done in philosophy."[14].
"I hold this thought−that the world is will−to be that which has long
been sought for under the name of philosophy, and the discovery of which
is therefore regarded, by those who are familiar with history, as quite
as impossible as the discovery of the philosopher's stone."[15]
"I only intend to imparta single thought. Yet, notwithstanding
all my endeavors, I could find no shorter way of imparting it than this
whole book.... Read the book twice, and the first time with great
patience."[16]
So much for modesty! "What is modesty but hypocritical humility, by
means of which, in a world swelling with envy, a man seeks to obtain
pardon for excellences and merits from those who have none.”[17]
"No doubt, when modesty was made a virtue, it was a very advantageous
thing for the fools; for everybody is expected to speak of himself as if
he were one."[18]

There was no humility about the first
sentence of Schopenhauer's book. "The world," it begins, "is my idea."
When Fichte had uttered a similar proposition even the metaphysically
sophisticated Germans had asked,−"What does his wife say about this?"
But Schopenhauer had no wife. His meaning, of course, was simple enough:
he wished to accept at the outset the Kantian position that the external
world is known to us only through our sensations and ideas. There
follows an exposition of idealism which is clear and forceful enough,
but which constitutes the least original part of the book, and might
better have come last than first. The world took a generation to
discover Schopenhauer because he put his worst foot forward, and hid his
own thought behind a two-hundred-page barrier of second-hand idealism.[19]

The most vital part of the first section
is an attack on materialism. How can we explain mind as matter, when we
know matter only through mind?

If we had followed materialism thus far
with clear ideas, when we reached its highest point we would suddenly be
seized with a fit of the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympians. As
if waking from a dream, we would all at once become aware that its fatal
result−knowledge−which it had reached so laboriously, was presupposed
as the indispensable condition of its very starting-point. Mere matter;
and when we imagined that we thought matter, we really thought only the
subject that perceives matter: the eye that sees it, the hand that feels
it, the understanding that knows it. Thus the tremendous petitio
principii reveals itself unexpectedly; for suddenly the last link is
seen to be the starting-point, the chain of a circle; and the
materialist is like Baron Münchausen, who, when swimming on horseback,
drew the horse into the air with his legs, and himself by his queue?[20]
The crude materialism which even now, in the middle of the nineteenth
century,[21]
has been served up again under the ignorant delusion that it is
original, . . stupidity denies vital force, and first of all tries to
explain the phenomena of life from physical and chemical forces, and
those again from the mechanical effects of matter.[22]
... But I will never believe that even the simplest chemical combination
will ever admit of mechanical explanation; much less the properties of
light, heat, and electricity. These will always require a dynamical
explanation.[23]

No: it
is impossible to solve the metaphysical puzzle, to discover the secret
essence of reality; by examining matter first, and then proceeding to
examine thought: we must begin with that which we know directly and
intimately−ourselves. "We can never arrive at the real nature of things
from without. However much we may investigate, we can never reach
anything but images and names. We are like a man who goes round a
castle seeking in vain for an entrance, and sometimes sketching the
facades.”[24]
Let us enter within. If we can ferret out the ultimate nature of our own
minds we shall perhaps have the key to the external world.

IV. THE WORLD AS WILL

1. The Will To Live

Almost without exception,
philosophers have placed the essence of mind in
thought and
consciousness; man was the knowing animal, the animal
rationale. "This
ancient and universal radical error, this enormous
proton pseudos,[25]...
mustbefore
everything be set aside."[26]
"Consciousness is the mere surface of our minds, of which, as of the
earth, we do not know the inside but only the crust."[27]
Under
the conscious intellect is the conscious or unconscious will, a
striving, persistent vital force, a spontaneous activity, a will of
imperious desire. The intellect may seem at times to lead the will, but
only as a guide leads his master; the will "is the strong blind" man
who carries on his shoulders the lame man who can see."[28]
We do not want a thing because we have found reasons for it, we find
reasons for it because we want it; we even elaborate philosophies and
theologies to cloak our desires.[29]
Hence Schopenhauer calls man the "metaphysical animal": other animals
desire without metaphysics. "Nothing is more provoking, when we are
arguing against a man with reasons and explanations, and taking all
pains to convince him, than to discover at last that he will not
understand, that we have to do with his will."[30]
Hence the uselessness of logic: no one ever convinced anybody by logic;
and even logicians use logic only as a source of income. To convince a
man, you must appeal to his self-interest, his desires, his will.
Observe how long we remember our victories, and how soon we forget our
defeats; memory is the menial of will.[31]
"In doing accounts we make mistakes much oftener in our own favor than
to our disadvantage; and this without the slightest dishonest
intention.”[32]
"On the other hand, the understanding of the stupidest man becomes keen
when objects are in question that closely concern his wishes";[33]
in general, the intellect is developed by danger, as in the fox, or by
want, as in the criminal. But always it seems subordinate and
instrumental to desire; when it attempts to displace the will, confusion
follows. No one is more liable to mistakes than he who acts only on
reflection.[34]

Consider the agitated strife of men for food, mates, or children; can
this be the work of reflection? Certainly not; the cause is the half
conscious will to live, and to live fully. "Men are only apparently
drawn from in front; in reality they are pushed from behind";[35]
they think they are led on by what they see, when in truth they are
driven on by what they feel,−by instincts of whose operation they are
half the time unconscious. Intellect is merely the minister of foreign
affairs; "nature has produced it for the service of the individual will.
Therefore it is only designed to know things so far as they afford
motives for the will, but not to fathom them or to comprehend their
true being."[36]
"The will is the only permanent and unchangeable element in the mind; .
. . it is the will which," through continuity of purpose, "gives unity
to consciousness and holds together all its ideas and thoughts,
accompanying them like a continuous harmony."[37]
It is the organ-point of thought.

Character lies in the will, and not in
the intellect; character too is continuity of purpose and attitude: and
these are will. Popular language is correct when it prefers the "heart"
to the "bead"; it knows (because it has not reasoned about it) that a
"good will" is profounder and more reliable than a clear
mind; and when it calls a man
"shrewd," "knowing," or "cunning" it implies its suspicion and dislike.
"Brilliant qualities of mind win admiration, but never affection"; and
"all religions promise a reward ... for excellences of the will or
heart, but none for excellences of the head or understanding."[38]

Even the body is the product of the will. The blood, pushed on by
that will which we vaguely call life, builds its own vessels by wearing
grooves in the body of the embryo; the grooves deepen and close up, and
become arteries and veins.[39]
The will to know builds the brain just as the will to grasp forms the
hand, or as the will to eat develops the digestive tract.[40]
Indeed, these pairs−these forms of will and these forms of flesh−are but
two sides of one process and reality. The relation is best seen in
emotion, where the feeling and the internal bodily changes form one
complex unit.[41]

The act of will and the movement of
the body are not two different things objectively known, which the bond
of causality unites; they do not stand in the relation of cause and
effect; they are one and the same, but they are given in entirely
different ways,-immediately, and again in perception.... The action of
the body is nothing but the act of the will objectified. This is true
of every movement of the body; ... the whole body is nothing but
objectified will.... The parts of the body must therefore completely
correspond to the principal desires through which the will manifests
itself; they must be the visible expression of these desires. Teeth,
throat and bowels are objectified hunger; the organs of generation are
objectified sexual desire. . . . The whole nervous system constitutes
the antennae of the will, which it stretches within and without. . . .As
the human body generally corresponds to the human will generally, so the
individual bodily structure corresponds to the individually modified
will, the character of the individua1.[42]

The intellect tires,
the will never; the intellect needs sleep, but the will works even in
sleep. Fatigue, like pain, has its seat in the brain; muscles not
connected with the cerebrum (like the heart) never tire.[43]
In sleep the brain feeds; but the will requires no food. Hence the need
for sleep is greatest in brain-workers. (This fact, however, "must not
mislead
us
into extending sleep unduly; for then
it loses in intensity ... and becomes mere loss of time.")[44]
In sleep the life of man sinks to the vegetative level, and
then "the will works according to its original and essential nature,
undisturbed from without, with no diminution of its power through the
activity of the brain and the exertion of knowing, which is the
heaviest organic function; . . . therefore in sleep the whole power of
the will is directed to the maintenance and improvement of the
organism. Hence all healing, all favorable crises, take place in sleep:[45]
Burdach was right when he declared sleep to be the original state. The
embryo sleeps almost continuously, and the infant most of the time.
Life is "a struggle against sleep: at first we win ground from it, which
in the end it recovers. Sleep is a morsel of death borrowed to keep up
and renew that part of life which has been exhausted by the day."[46]
"It is our eternal foe; even when we are awake it possesses us partly.
After all, what is to be expected of heads even the wisest of which is
every night the scene of the strangest and the most senseless dreams,
and which has to take up its meditations again on awakening from them?[47]

Will, then, is the essence of man. Now what if it is also the
essence of life in all its forms, and even of "inanimate" matter? What
if will is the long-sought-for, the long-despaired-of,
"thing-in-itself,"-the ultimate inner reality and secret essence of all
things?

Let us try, then, to
interpret the external world in terms of will. And let us go at once to
the bottom; where others have
said that will is a form of force let us say that force
is a form of will.[48]
To Hume's question−What is causality?−we shall answer, Will. As will
is the universal cause in ourselves, so is it in things; and unless we
so understand cause as will, causality will remain only a magic and
mystic formula, really meaningless. Without this secret we are driven to
mere occult qualities like "force," or "gravity," or "affinity"; we do
not know what these forces are, but we know-at least a little more
clearly-what will is; let us say, then, that repulsion and attraction,
combination and decomposition, magnetism and electricity, gravity and
crystallization, are Will.[49]
Goethe expressed this idea in the title of one of his novels, when he
called the irresistible attraction of lovers
die Wahlverwandschaften−"elective
affinities.” The force which draws the lover, and the force which
draws the planet, are one.

So in plant life. The lower we go among
the forms of life the smaller we find the role of intellect; but not so
with will.

That which in us pursues
its ends by the light of knowledge, but here ... only strives blindly
and dumbly in a one-sided and unchangeable manner, must yet in both
cases come under the name of Will.... Unconsciousness is the original
and natural condition of all things, and therefore also the basis from
which, in particular species of beings, consciousness results as their
highest efflorescence; wherefore even the unconsciousness always
continues to predominate. Accordingly, most existences are without
consciousness; but yet they act according to the laws of their
nature,−i. e., of their will. Plants have at most a very weak analogue
of consciousness; the lowest species of animals only the dawn of it. But
even after it has ascended through the whole series of animals to man
and his reason, the unconsciousness of plants, from which it started,
still remains the foundation, and may be traced in the necessity for
sleep.[50]

Aristotle was right: there is a power
within that moulds every form, in plants and planets, in animals and
men. "The instinct of animals in general gives us the best illustration
of what remains of teleology in nature. For as instinct is an action
similar to that which is guided by the
conception of an end, and yet is entirely without this; so all
construction in nature resembles that which is guided by the conception
of an end, and yet is entirely without it."[51]
The marvelous mechanical skill of animals shows how prior the will is
to the intellect. An elephant which had been led through Europe, and had
crossed hundreds of bridges, refused to advance upon a weak bridge,
though it had seen many horses and men crossing it. A young dog fears to
jump down from the table; it foresees the effect of the fall not by
reasoning (for it has no experience of such a fall) but by instinct.
Orangoutangs warm themselves by a fire which they find, but they do not
feed the fire; obviously, then, such actions are instinctive, and not
the result of reasoning; they are the expression not of intellect but of
will.[52]

The will, of course, is a will to live,
and a will to maximum life. How dear life is to all living things!−and
with what silent patience it will bide its time! "For thousands of years
galvanism slumbered in copper and zinc, and they lay quietly beside
silver, which must be consumed in flame as soon as all three are brought
together under the required conditions. Even in the organic kingdom we
see a dry seed preserve the slumbering force of life through three
thousand years, and, when at last the favorable circumstances occur,
grow up as a plant." Living toads found in limestone lead to the
conclusion that even animal life is capable of suspension for thousands
of years.[53]
The will is a will to live; and its eternal enemy is death.

But perhaps it can defeat even death?

2.
The
Will To Reproduce

It can, by the strategy and martyrdom of
reproduction. Every normal organism hastens, at maturity, to sacrifice
itself to the task of reproduction: from the spider who is eaten up by
the female he has just fertilized, or the wasp that devotes itself to
gathering food for offspring it will never see, to
the man who wears himself to ruin in
the effort to feed and clothe and educate his children. Reproduction is
the ultimate purpose of every organism, and its strongest instinct; for
only so can the will conquer death. And to ensure this conquest of
death, the will to reproduce is placed almost entirely beyond control of
knowledge or reflection: even a philosopher, occasionally, has
children.

The will shows itself here as independent of knowledge, and works
blindly, as in unconscious nature.... Accordingly, the reproductive
organs are properly the focus of will, and form the opposite pole to the
brain, which is the representative of knowledge.... The former are the
life-sustaining principle, they ensure endless life; for this reason
they were worshipped by the Greeks in the phallus and by the Hindus in
the lingam. ... Hesiod and Parmenides said very significantly that Eros
is the first, the creator, the principle from which all things proceed.
The relation of the sexes . . is really the invisible central point of
all action and conduct, and peeps out everywhere in spite of all veils
thrown over it. It is the cause of war and the end of peace; the basis
of what is serious, and the aim of the jest; the inexhaustible source of
wit, the key of all illusions, and the meaning of all mysterious hints.[54]
... We see it at every moment seat itself, as the true and hereditary
lord of the world, out of the fullness of its own strength, upon the
ancestral throne; and looking down thence with scornful glance, laugh at
the preparations made to bind it, or imprison it, or at least limit it
and, wherever possible, keep it concealed, and even so to master it that
it shall only appear as a subordinate, secondary concern of life.[55]

The "metaphysics of love" revolves about this subordination of the
father to the mother, of the parent to the child, of the individual to
the species. And first, the law of sexual attraction is that the choice
of mate is to a large extent determined, however unconsciously, by
mutual fitness to procreate.

Each seeks a mate that will
neutralize his defects, lest they be inherited; . . . a physically weak
man will seek a strong woman.... each one will especially regard as
beautiful in another individual those perfections which he himself
lacks, nay, even those imperfections which are the opposite of his own.[56]
... The physical qualities of two individuals can be such that for the
purpose of restoring as far as possible the type of the species, the one
is quite specially and perfectly the completion and supplement of the
other, which therefore desires it exclusively.... The profound
consciousness with which we consider and ponder every part of the
body.... the critical scrupulosity with which we look at a woman who
begins to please us ... the individual here acts, without knowing it, by
order of something higher than himself.... Every individual loses
attraction for the opposite sex in proportion as he or she is removed
from the fittest period for begetting or conceiving: ... youth without
beauty has still always attraction; beauty without youth has none....
That in every case of falling in love.... what alone is looked to is the
production of an individual of a definite nature, is primarily
confirmed by the fact that the essential matter is not the reciprocation
of love, but possession.[57]

Nevertheless, no
unions are so
unhappy as these
love
marriages−and precisely
for the reason that their aim is the perpetuation of the species, and
not the pleasure of the individual.[58]
"He who marries from love must live in sorrow," runs a Spanish proverb.
Half the literature of the marriage problem is stultified because it
thinks of marriage as mating, instead of thinking of it as an
arrangement for the preservation of the race. Nature does not seem to
care whether the parents are "happy forever afterwards," or only for a
day, so long as reproduction is achieved. Marriages of convenience,
arranged by the parents of the mates, are often happier than marriages
of love. Yet the woman who marries for love, against the advice of her
parents,
is
in a sense to be admired; for "she has preferred what is of most
importance, and has acted in the spirit of nature (more exactly, of the
species), while the parents advised in the spirit of individual
egoism.”[59]
Love is the best eugenics.

Since love is a deception practiced by nature, marriage
is
the attrition of love,
and must be disillusioning. Only a philosopher can be happy in
marriage, and philosophers do not marry.

Because the passion depended
upon an illusion which represented that which has value only for the
species as valuable for the individual, the deception must vanish after
the attainment of the end of the species. The individual discovers that
he has been the dupe of the species. If Petrarch's passion had been
gratified, his song would have been silenced.[60]

The subordination of the individual to the species as instrument
of its continuance, appears again in the apparent dependence of
individual vitality on the condition of the reproductive cells.

The sexual impulse is to be regarded as the inner life of the tree
(the species) upon which the life of the individual grows, like a leaf
that is nourished by the tree and assists in nourishing the tree; this
is why that impulse is so strong, and springs from the depths of our
nature. To castrate an individual means to cut him off from the tree of
the species upon which he grows, and thus severed, leaves him to wither;
hence the degradation of his mental and physical powers. That the
service of the species, i. e., fecundation, is followed in the case of
every animal individual by momentary exhaustion and debility of all the
powers, and in the case of most insects, indeed, by speedy death,-on
account of which Celsus said,
Seminis
emissio est partis animae jactura;
that in the case of man the
extinction of the generative power shows that the individual approaches
death; that excessive use of this power at every age shortens life,
while on the other hand, temperance in this respect increases all the
powers, and especially the muscular powers, on which account it was part
of the training of the Greek athletes; that the same restraint lengthens
the life of the insect even to the following spring; all this points to
the fact that the life of the individual is at bottom only borrowed from
that of the species.... Procreation is the highest point; and after
attaining to it, the life of the first individual quickly or slowly
sinks, while a new life ensures to nature the endurance of the species,
and repeats the same phenomena. . . . Thus the alternation of death and
reproduction is as the pulsebeat of the species. . . Death is for the
species what sleep is for the individual; ... his is nature's great
doctrine of immortality. . . . For the whole world, with all its
phenomena, is the objectivity of the one indivisible will, the Idea,
which is related to all other Ideas as harmony is related to the single
voice.... In Eckermann's
Conversations with Goethe
(vol. I, p. 181),
Goethe says: "Our spirit is a being
of a nature quite indestructible, and its activity continues from
eternity to eternity. It is like the sun, which seems to set only to our
earthly eyes, but which, in reality, never sets, but shines on
unceasingly." Goethe has taken the simile from me, not I from him.[61]

Only in space and time do we seem to be separate beings; they constitute
the "principle of individuation" which divides life into distinct
organisms as appearing in different places
or
periods; space and time are the Veil of Maya,−Illusion hiding the unity
of things. In reality there is only the species, only life, only will.
"To understand clearly that the individual
>is
only the
phenomenon, not the thing-in-itself," to see in "the constant change of
matter the fixed permanence of form,"−this is the essence of philosophy.[62]
"The motto of history should run:
Eadem, sed aliter."[63]
The more things change, the
more
they remain the same.

He to whom
men and all things have not at all times appeared as mere phantoms or
illusions, has no capacity for philosophy.... The true philosophy of
history lies in perceiving that, in all the endless changes and motley
complexity of events, it is only the self-same unchangeable being that
is before us, which today pursues the same ends as it did yesterday and
ever will. The historical philosopher has accordingly to recognize the
identical character in all events, . . . and in spite of all the variety
of special circumstances, of costumes and manners and customs, has to
see everywhere the same humanity. . . . To have read Herodotus is, from
a philosophical point of view, to have studied enough history....
Throughout and everywhere the true symbol of nature is the circle,
because it is the schema or type of recurrence.[64]

We like to believe that all history is
a halting and imperfect preparation for the magnificent era of which we
are the salt and summit; but this notion of progress is mere conceit and
folly. "In general, the wise in all ages have always said the same
things, and the fools, who at all times form the immense majority, have
in their way too acted alike, and done the opposite; and so it will
continue. For, as Voltaire says, we shall leave the world as foolish and
wicked as we found it.”[65]

In
the light of all this we get a new and grimmer sense of the inescapable
reality of determinism. "Spinoza says (Epistle 82) that if a Stone which
has been projected through the air had consciousness, it would believe
that it was moving of its own free will. I add to this only that the
stone would be right. The impulse given it is for the stone what the
motive is for me; and what in the stone appears as cohesion,
gravitation, rigidity, is in its inner nature the same as that which I
recognize in myself as well, and what the stone also, if knowledge were
given to it, would recognize as will.”[66]
But in neither the stone nor the philosopher is the will "free." Will
as a whole is free, for there is no other will beside it that could
limit it; but each part of the universal Will-each species, each
organism, each organ-is irrevocably determined by the whole.

Everyone believes himself
a priori to be perfectly
free, even in his individual actions, and thinks that at every moment he
can commence another manner of life, which just means that he can become
another person. But a posteriori,
through experience, he finds to his astonishment that he is
not free, but subjected to necessity; that in spite of all his
resolutions and reflections he does not change his conduct, and that
from the beginning of his life to the end of it, he must carry out the
very character which he himself condemns, and as it were, play the part
which he has undertaken, to the very end.[67]

V. THE WORLD AS EVIL

But if the world is will, it must be a world of suffering.

And first, because will itself indicates
want, and its grasp is
always greater than its reach. For every wish that is satisfied there
remain ten that are denied. Desire is infinite,
fulfillmentis
limited−"it is like the alms thrown to a beggar, that keepshim
alive today in order that his misery may be prolonged
tomorrow.... As long as our
consciousness is filled by our will,
so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with
their constant hopes and fears, so long as we are subject to willing, we
can never have lasting happiness or peace.”[68]
And fulfillment never
satisfies; nothing is so fatal to an ideal as its realization. "The
satisfied passion oftener leads to
unhappiness than to happiness. For its demands often conflict
so much with the personal welfare of him who is concerned that they
undermine it.”[69]
Each individual bears within himself a disruptive contradiction;
the realized desire develops a new desire, and so on endlessly. "At the
bottom this results from the fact that the will must live on itself, for
there exists nothing besides it, and it is a hungry will.”[70]

In every individual the measure of the pain
essential to him was determined once for all by his nature; a measure
which could neither remain empty, nor be more than filled ... If a great
and pressing care is lifted from our breast.... another immediately
replaces it, the whole material of which was already there before, but
could not come into consciousness as care because there was no capacity
left for it.... But now that there is room for this it comes forward and
occupies the throne.[71]

Again, life is evil because pain is its basic
stimulus and reality, and pleasure is merely a negative cessation of
pain. Aristotle was right: the wise man seeks not pleasure, but freedom
from care and pain.

[8]
Schopenhauer insists, hardly
with sufficient reason, and almost to the point of salesmanship,
that this book must be read before the World as Will and Idea
can be understood. The reader may nevertheless rest content with knowing
that the "principle of sufficient reason" is the "law of cause
and effect," in four forms: 1-Logical, as the determination of
conclusion by premisses; 2-Physical, as the determination of
effect by cause; 3-Mathematical, as the determination of
structure by the laws of mathematics and mechanics; and, 4-Moral, as the
determination of conduct by character.

[11]
"One instance of his humor had better be buried in the obscurity
of a foot-note. "The actor Unzelmann," notorious for adding
remarks of his own to the lines of the playwright, "was
forbidden, at the Berlin theatre, to improvise. Soon afterwards
he had to appear upon the stage on horseback." Just as they
entered, the horse was guilty of conduct seriously unbecoming a
public stage. "The audience began to laugh; whereupon Unzelmann
severely reproached the horse−Do you not know that we are
forbidden to improvise?"'-Vol. ii, p. 273.

[19]
Instead of recommending books
about Schopenhauer it would be better to send the reader to
Schopenhauer himself: all three volumes of his main work (with
the exception of Part I in each volume) are easy reading, and
full of matter; and all the Essays are valuable and delightful.
By way of biography Wallace’s
Life should
suffice. In this essay it has been thought desirable to condense
Schopenhauer's immense volumes not by rephrasing their ideas,
but by selecting and coordinating the salient passages, and
leaving the thought in the philosopher's own dear and brilliant
language The reader will have the benefit
of getting
Schopenhauer at first hand, however briefly.